"Would you--be good enough--" Alice panted out, after running a little further, "to stop a minute--just to get--one's breath again...?""I'm good enough," the King said, "only I'm not strong enough. You see, a minute goes by so fearfully quick. You might as well try to stop a Bandersnatch!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to b...ury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

When you model, the focus is completely on you, and some people really appreciate the attention, especially if they didn't get it ...growing up. You're being drawn; you're being looked at. There's a sense of acceptance that comes from that.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Prove that ever I lose more blood with love than I will get again with drinking, pick out mine eyes with a ballad-maker's pen and ...hang me up at the door of a brothel-house for the sign of blind Cupid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

What one really wants is youth, and what one really loses is years. Life becomes at last a mere piece of acting. One goes on by ha...bit, playing more or less clumsily that one is still alive. It is ludicrous and at times humiliating, but there is a certain style in it which youth has not. We become all, more or less, gentlemen; we are ancien régime; we learn to smile while gout racks us.... We get out of bed in the morning all broken up, without nerves, color or temper, and by noon we are joking with young women about the play. One lives in constant company with diseased hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs; one shakes hands with certain death at closer embrace every day; one sees paralysis in every feature and feels it in every muscle; all one's functions relax their action day by day; and, what is worse, one's grasp on the interests of life relaxes with the physical relaxation; and, through it all, we improve; our manners acquire refinement; our sympathies grow wider; our youthful self-consciousness disappears; very ordinary men and women are found to have charm; our appreciations have weight; we should almost get to respect ourselves if we knew of anything human to respect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Prometheus is action. Hamlet is hesitation. In Prometheus the obstacle is exterior; in Hamlet it is interior. In Prometheus the wi...ll is securely nailed down by nails of brass and cannot get loose; besides, it has by its side two watchers--Force and Power. In Hamlet the will is more tied down yet; it is bound by previous meditation--the endless chain of the undecided. Try to get out of yourself if you can! What a Gordian knot is our reverie. Slavery from within, that is slavery indeed. Scale this enclosure, "to dream!" escape, if you can, from this prison, "to love!" The only dungeon is that which walls conscience in. Prometheus, in order to be free, has but a bronze collar to break and a god to conquer; Hamlet must break and conquer himself. Prometheus can raise himself upright, if he only lifts a mountain; to raise himself up, Hamlet must lift his own thoughts. If Prometheus plucks the vulture from his breast, all is said; Hamlet must tear Hamlet from his breast. Prometheus and Hamlet are two naked livers; from one runs blood, from the other doubt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

--I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man's inmost heart.--It does, Mr Bloom said....Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

[There is a] no-win decision that innumerable people make, or try to make, or try to put off making daily: Whether to give up the ...job, the place, the people, the future one holds dear, denying one's own mental capacities, independence, and desires (what are left of them, what one remembers of them) just to get away. They will find themselves disgusting if they let their tormentor get his way, not ... by touching their body ... but by forcing them to flee, to change anything they would not have changed if they were free to keep it: their white collar career or their cash register at the supermarket, it doesn't matter in the slightest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »